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Tag Archives: Constitutional

Yesterday I opined that I could hardly wait to see what would happen following Eric Holder’s letter to Kansas Governor Sam Brownback over the new Kansas law nullifying federal attempts at gun control in Kansas.

Christopher Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax, thinks that Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins is “one of us.” He takes particular umbrage at an ad from a pro-gun group (the National Association for Gun Rights) that attacked Collins for

Last week I waxed eloquent and enthusiastic about a bill headed to Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s desk that I called the “strongest pro-gun bill” in the country. And for a brief period it was. It said that any gun in the state of Kansas was off-limits to federal intrusion, referring to protections granted not only under the Second, Ninth and Tenth Amendments, but also to Section 4 of the Kansas constitution as well. It prohibited state employees from assisting the feds from enforcing unconstitutional laws and further considered any violations of the bill as felonies. It was really something to rejoice about. I wrote:

It not only covers individual citizens in the state but also protects manufacturers of firearms or firearms parts or suppliers to those manufacturers. In other words, if it has anything to do with firearms in the state of Kansas, the federal government cannot do anything that the state considers to be unconstitutional.

I even quoted one of the bill’s supporters who exclaimed as the Kansas legislature passed the bill: “Passage of SB 102 means that the Second Amendment and the Tenth Amendment are alive and well in Kansas!”

But the change of just two words in the bill weakened it considerably, and has caused me to withdraw my rejoicing over it. Those two words, inserted at the last minute by person or persons unknown but who knew exactly what he was doing, eliminated any gun not manufactured commercially or privately inside the state that had never left the state from the protection of the bill. Any other gun is not covered. That no doubt excludes most of the firearms owned in Kansas.

So at the request of my editor who brought this ingenuous bit of political watering-down to my attention I have asked him to make this correction to the end of that article:

Correction: Never underestimate the ability of a politician or a conference committee to make hash of a great bill. In the final bill which reached the governor’s desk, a slight change in language in the bill weakened it considerably. That change limited the protection under the bill only to those guns that were manufactured commercially or privately in the state of Kansas, thus neatly excluding all others from the bill’s protection. The author regrets not only the error but the change in the language of the bill which weakens it substantially. Our enthusiasm for the bill has also been greatly reduced.

“If you read the Manchin-Toomey substitute amendment, you can see all the advances for our cause that it contains,” Gottlieb wrote. He then listed the gun rights advantages in the bill: “interstate sales of handguns, veteran gun rights restoration, travel with firearms protection, civil and criminal immunity lawsuit protection, and most important of all, the guarantee that people, including federal officers, will go to federal prison for up to 15 years if they attempt to use any gun sales records to set up a gun registry.”

The Washington Post filled in some of the blanks:

While leading gun-control advocates — including President Obama and New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) — back the bipartisan proposal, the announcement of support Sunday from the Citizens Committee reveals that substantial parts of the bill are viewed as “wins” for the gun lobby, including provisions that would prohibit a government registry of gun ownership and make it easier to transport and market weapons across state lines.

Another gun rights group, the Independent Firearm Owners Association (IFOA), also is going along with the compromise. Headed up by Richard Feldman, a former successful regional director for the NRA, endorsed the measure as well. Feldman blew the whistle on the NRA in his book, Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist, but thinks there’s enough in the compromise for his much smaller group to support.

According to WaPo, even with the new language and new promises and guarantees and such, the bill has little chance of passing the Senate because too many Senators are fearful of losing their seats in 2014:

Some have already rejected its argument.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who voted to proceed with debate, labeled the Manchin-Toomey agreement “unworkable and unfair to gun owners” in a message sent to constituents late last week. Because the plan would require gun purchasers to pay for a background check, “visitors to . . . gun shows across America will face a new tax of $30 to $50, and sometimes more, as they exercise their constitutional right to buy a gun,” Coburn said, adding that gun owners “will ignore and reject these changes.”

There must be some political benefit to Alan Gottlieb and Richard Feldman to go along with any attempt to infringe, but I don’t see it. If the bill infringes, it’s wrong and should be opposed. Making deals with politicians is highly risky, especially when they concern inalienable rights.

37 of Colorado’s 62 county sheriffs are in the process of filing a lawsuit to block implementation and enforcement of the state’s new gun laws which are scheduled to go into effect on July 1st. Weld County Sheriff John Cooke is the de facto spokesman for the plaintiffs who will claim that the new laws violate the Constitution’s Second and Fourteenth Amendments.

However, the County Sheriffs of Colorado will not be joining Cooke as a plaintiff, according to Executive Director Chris Olson: “The Board of Directors made a decision that this was not something that the association should join in.” This decision was made despite its publication of a position paper posted during the debates opposing most of the new gun laws. According to that paper,

We believe the Second Amendment is no less important [than] the other nine Amendments contained in the Bill of Rights.

The paper opposed a ban on so-called “assault weapons,” on any person’s right to sell privately firearms to another person, any limitation on magazine capacity or a state-wide database for concealed carry permit holders. It urged legislators to go slow in enacting new laws following the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut: “We urge our elected state elected officials not to make decisions during this grieving period because it would likely lead to policies that are unenforceable and possibly unconstitutional, while punished law-abiding citizens and doing nothing to reduce violent crime.”

A glimpse into the possible arguments to be brought to light in the lawsuit was provided by Dave Kopel, the lawyer likely to direct the prosecution. Kopel, an adjunct professor of advanced constitutional law at Denver University and research director at Denver’s Independence Institute, in an article in National Review on April 5th, entitled “Turning Gun Owners into Felons.” Although directed to efforts to blunt federal efforts to pass universal background checks, Kopel’s arguments might just appear in the Colorado lawsuit. Wrote Kopel:

[The legislation being considered in Congress] would turn almost every gun owner into a felon … the language under consideration applies not only to sales but also to “transfers” which are defined to include innocent activities such as letting your spouse borrow your gun for a few hours.

Kopel paints a picture of a woman who bought a rifle when she was 25 years old. Looking back years later, she remembers times when she loaned the gun to a friend, or took it over to a neighbor’s house because he wanted to learn more about guns, or when she took it on a camping trip and let her niece do some plinking with it. She remembers teaching a class to some young people on gun safety and bringing the rifle to class to let her students become familiar with it. She remembers her time as a Boy Scout den mother when she taught the boys how to handle and shoot the rifle. As Kopel writes:

Every one of [these] activities would be a federal felony, subject to precisely the same punishment a person would receive if [she] had knowingly sold a firearm to a convicted felon.

This is not “gun control” in the constitutionally legitimate sense: reasonable laws that protect public safety without interfering with the responsible ownership and use of firearms.

It is likely that Kopel will invoke the Heller case as well as the McDonald case which extended the rights guaranteed in the Second Amendment to individual citizens living in the several states. It isn’t clear whether the lawsuit will be filed in state court or in federal court. What is clear is that this will be a long journey beginning with the first step: the Colorado sheriffs protesting by legal means the unconstitutional incursion of the state legislature into Colorado citizens’ rights to keep and bear arms.

Shayne Heap is the sheriff of Elbert County, Colorado, one of 62 sheriffs who weren’t invited to serve as a backdrop for President Obama’s latest trip to Denver to push for his gun controls. Instead, Heap took the opportunity to vent his spleen at Obama’s hypocrisy and it’s a wonderful thing to watch.

He said “it’s too bad these tragic events have only served to be a launching point for political agendas and grand standing … to make laws that are constitutionally questionable and punitive to law-abiding citizens, who’ve done nothing wrong, borders on legislative abuse.”

He added that Obama left Washington, DC, which enjoys the highest murder rate per capita in the country in order to tell Colorado how to

At noon on Thursday Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy signed into law a wide-ranging bill in response to last year’s shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. After weeks of closed-door negotiations between Republican and Democrat leaders and another 13 hours of debate on Wednesday, the 139-page bill was passed by the House, 105-44. It had previously passed the Senate, 26-10.

On Monday afternoon lawmakers in Connecticut announced success in molding a bi-partisan approach to gun violence following weeks of closed-door negotiations. It will be voted upon on Wednesday and is expected to pass the Democrat-controlled General Assembly with ease.

Rather than focus on improving security at schools, lawmakers instead turned their attention to

On Wednesday, April 1st, 1942, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt issued “Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry” that they “will be evacuated from the above designated area [north San Francisco] by 12 o’clock noon Tuesday, April 7th… The Civil Control Station at 1701 Van Ness Avenue will provide temporary residence elsewhere…[and] transport persons…to their new residence…”. Some 120,000 persons were deported from California and sent to internment camps in

When a CBS affiliate reported on Wednesday the existence of a hotline that anonymous callers could use to report neighbors who possibly might illegally possess a firearm, some claimed the timing with the recent passage of New York’s SAFE Act was just too coincidental.

Two Colorado sheriffs, John Cooke of Weld County and Terry Maketa of El Paso County, have vowed not to enforce the new gun bills just passed by the Colorado legislature that are about to be signed into law by Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. Said Cooke, “They’re just feel-good, knee-jerk reactions that are

On Friday afternoon a federal district court judge ruled that National Security Letters (NSLs) are unconstitutional under not only the First Amendment but under the “separation of powers” principle as well. As Alex Johnson, a staff writer for NBC News put it, those NSLs are

Just when I was beginning to think that 1) all common sense had vanished from the public square and 2) that our privacy was inevitably and eternally to be violated by government snoops, along comes Judge Illston

When defense counsel for James Holmes, the alleged Aurora, Colorado shooter, said on Monday that Holmes was not ready to enter a plea in his murder trial, Arapahoe County District Court Judge William Sylvester entered one for him: not guilty. The judge also said Holmes could change that plea to

When three Democrats said they were going to side with Republicans on two of the gun bills being debated in Denver, the Democrats pulled them, claiming victory. By pulling the bills that would have included a gun ban on campuses and another holding firearms owners liable for damages, Democrats claimed victory over those that were left: a restriction on ammunition magazine limits, and universal background checks.

What is before us is not a constitutional question but a policy question.

Mary Hodge (D-Adams County) said:

This bill is merely an attempt to reduce the slaughter.

But Ted Harvey (D-South Denver) took the prize. [Note: please see comments at the end of this article] When Amanda Collins said that if she had had a gun she would have been able to repel an attacker who raped her, Harvey replied:

What we’re trying to do here tonight is not protect ourselves from violent crime … but to protect students and teachers from feeling uncomfortable by you carrying a gun to protect yourself. (emphasis added)

I’m not making this up. You can click this link which will take you to a YouTube video of Harvey’s “explanation” – you’ll find it at the 1:30 point in the video.

Even Governor Hickenlooper is drinking from the same glass, claiming with a straight face that he supports all of the bills and will sign any that reach his desk, but

I’m not in any way an anti-gun person.

That’s really good to know, Governor, as guns don’t have feelings and we certainly wouldn’t want them to be offended, would we?

Note: Readers have asked me to review the Harvey video again, suggesting that I was misreading Harvey’s comments. I have done so and have concluded that I have done the man a disservice in making it appear that he was expressing his opinion about feelings when he was in fact apologizing to Amanda for others in the legislature who were more concerned about their constituents’ feelings than about her right to self defense. For that I apologize.

However, the intent of the article remains intact. Logic is rarely involved by those in the anti-gun camp. History means little to them. Well-founded arguments presented in opposition to their position are ignored, or ridiculed. Feelings are how they govern.

Don’t worry, he says. We’re in charge here, we know what we’re doing and while we appreciate your input, we’re going to go ahead and trample on your constitutional rights to own firearms. But hey, it’s just a little trample. Don’t get excited.